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THE IMMORTALITY OF THE 

SOUL IN THE POEMS OF 

TENNYSON AND 

BROWNING 

BY 

HENRY JONES, LL.D., D.Litt. 

Fellow of the British Academy 
Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Glasgow 




BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1907 






\i\C 



1 






PREFACE 

In doing me the honour of inviting me to 
deliver ' The Essex Hall Lecture ' for 1905, 
the British and Foreign Unitarian Associa- 
tion expressed the desire that it should be 
pubhshed. I could wish that the lecture 
better repaid their courtesy. 

It is not merely that the treatment I 
have been able to offer of the theme is 
inadequate ; but I have ventured to apply 
the methods of philosophy to the poets. 
And if I have done wrong, I can offer no 
apology, for the wrong is deliberate. 

It has long seemed to me that the current 
distinctions between the methods of the 
philosopher and the poet, and of the 
scientific and the common consciousness, are 
less significant than they seem to be : that 



4 PREFACE 

in the last resort there is only one way of 
seeking to know what is true, and one way 
of holding it when it is found. 

This fact has not been overlooked by 
recent writers on philosophy. But, on the 
whole, the use they have made of it has been 
destructive. They have sought to expose 
the h5^othetical and imaginative character 
of reasoned thought, rather than to bring 
into view the broad principles that give 
coherence to our great imaginative literature, 
and stabiUty and sanity to the ordinary 
experience of mankind. 

I have sought in this lecture to put this 
conception of the ultimate affinity of all 
forms of human experience to another use ; 
and especially in its reference to the objects 
of reUgious faith. I have tried to show that 
to these, too, belong the cogency that 
comes from reason. In so far as religious 
conceptions serve to make the world more 
intelligible and man's practice more rational, 
they share the right to convince which belongs 



PREFACE 5 

to the most secure of all the human sciences. 
The function of reason in religious life is 
denied or limited only because its nature 
is little understood. And we wrong our 
great poets, even as they wronged themselves, 
when we treat the truths they bring as if 
they were but rapt, unreasoned utterances, 
expressing nothing more than their individual 
moods. 

Henry Jones. 

The University of Glasgow. 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 
IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 

' The Immortality of the Soul ' is one 
of those grave matters on which most men 
of refinement are naturally reticent. They 
break their silence, as a rule, only when they 
are deeply moved : the solemn thoughts 
that lie in the still recesses of their soul 
are brought to the surface only by the 
swinging of the waters after a great storm. 
It was the death of Socrates, the apparent 
victory of the wicked and ignorant over 
' the wisest and justest and best of all the 
men of his time,' which led Plato to speak 
of Immortality, as almost no other has done. 
With that consummate art which is perfect 
truth, he makes Socrates discuss the meaning 
of death and of that which may lie beyond 
death, during the solemn hours between 
the dawn and the evening twilight of his 
last day upon earth. * As I am going to 



8 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

another place, it is very meet for me to be 
thinking and talking of the nature of the 
pilgrimage which I am about to make. 
What can I do better in the interval between 
this and the setting sun ? ' 

It is in a similar way and similar spirit 
that Tennyson and Browning raised this 
great question. Their thoughts had often 
ranged along the line of the horizon where 
man's destiny dips out of sight. But it 
was the death of Arthur Hallam that, for 
once, disturbed the even equipoise and well- 
nigh broke down the strong restraints of 
Tennyson's spirit, which ordinarily moved 
like a star to its own music in the twihght 
sky of his thoughts. Browning was habitu- 
ally less reticent on all matters that concern 
the human soul, and the speculative impulse 
in him was more daring. He often spoke 
of the future Hfe during the fifty years and 
more of his poetic labour. But if it was the 
death of Arthur Hallam that brought the 
wild grief, the sustained reflection, and the 
solemn joy of In Memoriam, it was the 
sudden death of Browning's young friend 
at La Saisiaz — she who was ' summoned in 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 9 

that dread way, without premonitory touch 
as she talked and laughed,' which startled 
his knightly spirit to put on its armour, 
and led him to challenge his own faith, and 
to dare his own doubts of Immortality. 

It would thus seem that ' Death ' and 
' Immortality ' are not subjects for speech 
in ordinary moods or amongst ordinary 
circumstances. A certain preparation of 
spirit — some impressive ghmpse of the nar- 
row and uncertain limits of the present life 
or of the exceeding weight of things eternal 
— is required before we can profitably raise 
these grave questions. 

Indeed, there are many men, and these 
amongst the best and the most wise, who 
maintain that we do not well in concerning 
ourselves with these matters. ' Let us think 
on living,' they say. ' Let us keep faithful 
sentry at our post, in the midst of the 
impenetrable darkness that surrounds our 
little lives, and refuse to perplex our souls 
with questions which we cannot answer. 
Sufficient unto the day is the duty thereof. 
To a man who is within his duty, Death 
does not count' 



10 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

Now, I cannot withhold my reverence 
for the men who in the strength of their 
moral faith assume this attitude, and who 
rank loyalty to simple truth, even when 
truth is silent, above whatever peace those 
hopes may bring which may turn out false. 
In the marvellous picture that Plato draws 
of the last hours of his master, there is 
nothing more perfect in its beauty than the 
utter loyalty of Socrates to the truth. He 
is afraid lest the nearness of death and the 
magnitude of the issues which are at stake 
should lead him to pervert the truth in 
his own favour and to argue falsely for the 
life hereafter. ' I would ask you,' he says, 
*to be thinking of the truth and not of 
Socrates. Agree with me, if I seem to you 
to be speaking the truth ; or, if not, with- 
stand me might and main, that I may 
not deceive you, as well as myself, in my 
enthusiasm, and, like the bee, leave my 
sting in you before I die.* 

But, you will ask, should not the reticence 
of the wise, the sufficiency of duty for the 
good, and the uncertainty of the matter, 
teach us to fortify ourselves against these 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING II 

questionings ? I believe not, for several 
reasons. 

In the first place, it is very doubtful if 
we can do so. 

Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides, — 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
As old and new at once cis nature's self. 
To rap and knock and enter in our soul. 
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring. 
Round the ancient idol, on his base again, — 
The grand Perhaps I 

Bishop Blowgram's Apology. 

In the second place, it is doubtful whether 
it is wise to shut down these thoughts and 
seek to reconcile ourselves to ignorance, 
even if that were in our power. Those who 
do not sometimes pause to reflect upon the 
ultimate problems of human destiny while 
the tide of life is still at the flood and its 
interests are many, are liable, when the ebb 
comes, and life is sinking into emptiness, 
to welcome the crudest superstition that is 
next to hand. And that most certainly is 
not good. 



12 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

In the last place, it is only by coming to 
a reckoning with death that those magnificent 
convictions of which we have spoken can be 
gained by man. ' That death does not 
count,' that ' Come what may, the duty of 
the moment sufiftceth,' are not beUefs which 
can be possessed by the thoughtless. Those 
who have gained them, so far from avoiding 
the thought of death and what may come 
after, have looked it in the face and seen 
that there are things to be feared more than 
death. They have put the thought of death 
in so vast and so spiritual a context that its 
significance is dwarfed ; and all the meaning 
that remains for it is not natural any more, 
but spiritual. 

This, it seems to me, is, in its essence, 
what has been done by both of these great 
poets. Each, in his own way, has challenged 
death ; and each has found that, provided 
the moral world stands and God remains, 
death cannot in itself mean much, and what 
it does mean is good. To understand this 
is to appropriate their thought upon this 
question of the Immortality of the Soul. 

Now, there are two ways of considering 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 13 

what they have said. One is to examine 
tlieir utterances critically, in order to bring 
out the similarities and differences in the 
details of their faith and the subtle nuances 
of the spiritual disposition which finds 
expression in these utterances. This is the 
method of the commentator, and it is 
full of interest and instruction. The other 
method is to dwell upon the broad features 
of their belief with the view of discovering 
the basis on which they made it to rest : 
to find out what validity, what value for 
others, there is in their trust. This is the 
method I shall follow, I shall look to the 
poets for help for myself in the contempla- 
tion of this problem of death and immor- 
tality — dealing with them as teachers of 
truth, rather than as poets or ministers 
of beauty. 

. Perhaps the first thing that impresses the 
student of Tennyson and Browning is the 
fulness of their belief in the Immortality 
of the Soul._ ] If they did ever doubt its 
truth — which is very questionable — doubt 
only shook the torpor of assurance from their 
creed : it left the belief itself more strong 



14 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

and fixed. Its roots travelled deeper into 
their experience and intertwined itself with 
it ever the more vitally as their life matured 
to its close. 

^ A close examination of Tennyson*s poems 
would show that he entertained, at different 
times, different conceptions regarding the 
state of the soul after death. He repudiates 
the view that the soul ' passes at once into 
a final state of bliss or woe.' 

No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man, 
But thro' the will of One who knows and rules — 
And utter knowledge is but utter love — 
iEonian Evolution, swift or slow, 
Thro' all the Spheres — an ever opening height, 
An ever lessening earth. 

The Ring. 

Browning emphatically sets aside both 
the final woe and the final extinction of the 
wicked. The first of these notions he discards 
in a passage of extraordinary force in the 
Inn Album — probably the most powerful 
exposure in our language of the astounding 
doctrine of eternal punishment. 

After death. 
Life : man created new, ingeniously 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING I5 

Perfect for a vindictive purpose now 

That man, first fashioned in beneficence. 

Was proved a failure ; intellect at length 

Replacing old obtuseness, memory 

Made mindful of delinquent's bygone deeds 

Now that remorse was vain, which life-long lay 

Dormant when lesson might be laid to heart ; 

New gift of observation up and down 

And round man's self, new power to apprehend 

Each necessary consequence of act 

In man for well or ill — things obsolete — 

Just granted to supplant the idiocy 

Man's only guide while act was yet to choose. 

With ill or well momentously its fruit ; 

A faculty of immense suffering 

Conferred on mind and body, — mind, erewhile 

Unvisited by one compunctious dream 

During sin's drunken slumber, startled up, 

Stung through and through by sin's significance 

Now that the holy was abolished — just 

As body which, alive, broke down beneath 

Knowledge, lay helpless in the path to good, 

Failed to accomphsh aught legitimate, 

Achieve aught worthy, — which grew old in youth, 

And at its longest fell a cut-down flower, — 

Dying, this too revived by miracle 

To bear no end of burden now that back 

Supported torture to no use at all. 

And Uve imperishably potent — since 

Life's potency was impotent to ward 

One plague off which made earth a hell before. 



' l6 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

This doctrine, which one healthy view of things, 

One sane sight of the general ordinance — 

Nature, — and its particular object, — Man, — 

Which one mere eye-cast at the character 

Of Who made these and gave man sense to boot, 

Had dissipated once and evermore, — 

This doctrine I have dosed our flock withal. 

The Inn Album. 

^ — The idea of the extinction of the wicked 
is rejected by Browning at the close of the 
Pope's soliloquy in the Ring and, the Book, in 
another of his most splendid passages. 
Speaking of the sentence of death he has 
just passed on Guido, the main criminal, 
the Pope says : — 

For the main criminal I have no hope 

Except in such a suddenness of fate. 

I stood at Naples once, a night so dark 

I could have scarce conjectured there was eairth 

Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : 

But the night's black was burst through by a blaze — 

Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bote, 

Through her whole length of mountain visible : 

There lay the city thick and plain with spires, 

And. like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 

So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, 

And Guido see, one instant, and be saved. 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING I7 

Eke I avert my face, nor follow him 
Into that sad obscure sequestered state 
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else made first in vain ; which must not be. 

The Pope : The Ring and the Booh. 

Neither could Tennyson adopt the beUef 
that any soul would in the end be excluded 
from a God of love. 

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 

In Memoriam, Iv. 

L/Both of the poets recur again and again 
to the conception of the soul as entering 
on a second individual life after death, and, 
indeed, on a series of lives — whether on 
earth or elsewhere — ' The soul in each em- 
bodiment reaching a higher stage of being, and 
approaching more and more nearly to God.' 

Live thou ! and of the grain and husk, the grape 
And ivyberry, choose ; and still depart 
From death to death thro' life and life, and find 
Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought 
Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite. 
But this main-miracle, that thou art thou. 
With power on thine own act and on the world. 

De Profundis 



1 8 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

This is the habitual attitude of Tennyson ; 
and to him the final union with God in 
which the process culminates, ' the loss of 
personality (if so it were), seemed to be not 
extinction but the true life.' 

In like manner, Browning gives frequent 
expression to this idea of continued evolution 
from life to life. 

It seethes with the morrow for us and more. 
Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven. 

There's a fancy some lean to and others hate — 

That, when this life is ended, begins 
New work for the soul in another state. 

Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins : 
Where the strong and the weak, this world's congeries. 

Repeat in large what they practised in small, 
Through life after Ufe in unUmited series ; 

Only the scale's to be changed, that's all. 

Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen 

By the means of Evil that Good is best. 
And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's 
serene — 

When our faith in the same has stood the test — 
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, 

The uses of labour are surely done ; 
There remaineth a rest for the people of God : 

And I have had troubles enough, for one. 

Old Pictures in Florence. 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING I9 

With this note, as of momentary weariness, 
rarely heard from this strong and strenuous 
spirit, we shall turn aside from these 
secondary questions as to the manner of 
the soul's hfe after death, and take up the 
question of Immortality itself — meaning 
simply by that ' the conscious and indefinitely 
prolonged life of the soul beyond death.' 
This was ' undoubtedly a matter of fixed 
belief ' for both the poets ; and of ' an 
importance so great that life without the 
belief in it seemed to them to have neither 
sense nor value.' ^ 

My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core. 

And dust and ashes all that is. 

In Memoriatn, xxxiv. 

I have lived, then, done and suffered, loved and hated, 

learnt and taught 
This — there is no reconcihng wisdom with a Avorld 

distraught. 
Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in 

the aim. 



* See Professor A. C. Bradley's ' Commentary on In 
Memoriam ' : Macmillan & Co. 



20 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

If — (to my own sense, remember ! though none other 

feel the same ! ) — 
If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil's place. 
And life, time, — ^with all their chances, changes, — just 

probation-space. 
Mine, for me. La Saisiaz. 

But there is no need that I should dwell 
further upon this matter. They have given 
expression to this belief so frequently, and 
in such a variety of ways, both in their poems 
and in their letters, that no one can doubt 
that the ' Grand Perhaps ' of Immortality 
was for them a final and inexpressibly 
significant conviction. 

In nothing did they reveal their affinity 
to their times, more than in this. For at 
the heart of the thought, nay of the very 
disposition of the mind of their age and ours 
is the conception that the natural world 
and the natural life of man signify much 
more than that which at first meets the eye. 
Ever since the days of Lessing and Kant 
mankind has been travelling away from the 
narrow infinitude and hard-lined limitedness 
of the days of Hume. Philosophers and 
poets aUke — almost all of the greatest of 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 21 

them — Fichte and Schelling, Hegel and 
Goethe, Carlyle and Wordsworth, Shelley, 
Tennyson, and Browning, have steeped the 
present hfe in the life to come. Thought 
and sense, spirit and nature interpenetrate ; 
time is saturated with eternity. The universe 
is spirit- woven, God is immanent in it, and 
every meanest object is in its way ' filled 
full of magical music, as they freight a star 
with light.' There has been no age in the 
world's history when doubt was more deep 
or stem. The lines of science were never 
drawn more stringently, binding together 
in an ever closer phalanx the ranks of 
necessity, and limiting ever more remorse- 
lessly the charter of an irresponsible 
imagination. But the doubt itself contains 
the promise, and is even the reflex of a larger 
faith — faith in an order whose sweep is 
wider and its spiritual significance indefinitely 
deeper. This faith, as Tennyson says, 

. . Reels not in the storm of warring words. 
She brightens at the clash of ' Yes ' and ' No,' 
She sees the Best that glimmers thro' the Worst, 
She feels the sun is hid but for a night. 
She spies the summer thro' the \v'inter bud. 
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls. 



22 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

She hears the lark within the songless egg. 
She finds the fountain where they wail'd ' Mirage ! ' 

The Ancient Sage. 

But what I desire to ask is the stern ques- 
tion : Have we verily any right to such a 
triumphant conviction ? What gave it to 
our poets ? On what grounds did they 
hold it ? And what validity have those 
grounds ? 

To these questions we shall now turn. 
And the answer offered plainly, both by 
Tennyson and Browning, is that these 
grounds are not intellectual grounds. 

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, 

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in. 

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone. 

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone. 

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one : 

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no 

Nor yet that thou art mortal. . . . 

For nothing worthy proving can be proven, 

Nor yet disproven : wherefore thou be wise, 

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt. 

And cling to Fciith beyond the forms of Faith ! 

The Ancient Sage. 

The same conviction we find almost any- 
where in Browning, and especially in his 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 23 

later poems, where imagination passes into 
philosophic reflection. Human knowledge, 
he beheves, fails at every great crisis, and 
he bids us 

Take the joys and bear the sorrows — neither with 

extreme concern ! 
Living here means nescience simply : 'tis next Ufe 

that helps to learn. 

La Saisiaz. 

What need to confess again 

No problem this to solve 
By impotence ? Asolando. 

In some of his poems, and especially in 
La Saisiaz, he develops an argument that 
sure knowledge of the hereafter might destroy 
our liberty of choice here. So that hope of 
immortality is not only all that we can 
have, but all that we ought to desire in this 
sphere of probation — hope alternating with 
fear. 

This argument, you will observe, gives 
a positive value to ignorance, making it 
a condition of the moral life : ' Neither 
good nor evil does man, doing what he 
must ' {La Saisiaz). But it is not hard to 
meet. It can be shown to rest on confusion 



24 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

between the natural necessity which compels, 
and the moral necessity which is self-imposed. 
And, besides, the whole course of human 
history, in so far as it is progressive, consists 
in escaping from the yoke of the former 
in order to pass into the willing service of 
the latter. ' Behold how I love thy law,' 
says the Psalmist. 

But what we have to deal with is the main 
conclusion of these poets. 

We have but faith : we cannot know ; 
For knowledge is of things we see. 

In Memoriam. 

Thus much at least is clearly understood — 
Of power does Man possess no particle : 
Of knowledge — just so much as shows that still 
It ends in ignorance on every side. 

Francis Furini. 

' Sad summing up of all ' is Browning's 
own verdict on this conclusion. Ignorance, 
necessary, inexpugnable, rooted in the very 
nature of our minds, ignorance of precisely 
those matters which, if true, are momentous 
beyond aU else — how can man call such 
a condition good, or not cry out 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 25 

Oh, this false for real, 
This emptiness which feigns solidity. — 
Ever some grey that's white, and dun that's black — 
When shall we rest on the thing itself, 
Not on its semblance ? Soul — too weak, forsooth, 
To cope with fact — wants fiction everywhere ! 
Mine tires of falsehood : truth at any cost I 

A Bean-Stripe. 

Now, I believe that this impatience of 
mere seeming is the proper attitude of the 
human spirit. Amongst the needs of man, 
meant to be satisfied, is the need of knowledge. 
But a faith that is separated from reason 
cannot satisfy this need. Those who rest 
on such a faith, or have recourse to ' intuition ' 
which is only tradition and habit in disguise, 
or to ' feeling ' which in fact can give neither 
truth nor error, are distinguished from the 
Agnostic in nowise except that 'he is better 
aware of his ignorance and more frank in 
the confession of it. 

This solution by means of an Agnostic 
faith is much too easy to be right. It heals 
the wounds of the soul too slightl}' : they 
bleed afresh when touched by doubt. This, 
indeed, is the universal e^Tperience of all 
who have really doubted. Man has neither 



26 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

the right nor the power to be satisfied with 
a faith that is divorced from reason. And 
the rehgious man who reUes on such a 
faith, gives away his case. 

I beheve, moreover, that he is entitled 
to take stronger ground. Nay, I shall try 
to show that our poets, in spite of all they 
say of knowledge, themselves take stronger 
grounds. So far from ousting reason from 
this great quest of Immortahty, they have 
employed it as their guide ; and reason, so 
far from failing them in their hour of need, 
is just that which has gained for them 
those splendid convictions which they 
attribute to faith. Using the well-known 
phrase of Kant, I may say that their faith is 
the ' faith of reason.' It was reason that 
selected the elements which it contains, 
and it was reason that compacted these 
elements into a consistent, congruous, and 
self -sustained whole. 

Their doubt of reason and despair of 
knowledge arose, I believe, from confusion 
as to their nature. And it is to confusion 
of thought regarding these that we must 
attribute much of that acknowledged and 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 27 

unacknowledged Agnosticism of this and 
other times, which is the insecure refuge of 
intellectual despair. The importance of the 
matter more than justifies us in dwelling 
upon it with some fulness, for it is the joint 
in the armour of religious behef at which 
doubt always aims its fatal shaft. 

It will assist us to remove this confusion 
if we begin by distinguishing between Reason 
and Logic. That distinction is precisely 
parallel to the difference between Geology 
and the earth, or Astronomy and the stars 
and planets, or Botany and plants. Geology, 
Astronomy, and Botany are sciences, or 
more or less systematic bodies of knowledge ; 
but the earth, the stars, the planets, the 
plants, are the facts for which these sciences 
offer an explanation. This is evident. We 
do not confuse these, nor speak of the 
theories as if they were the facts themselves. 
But we are less careful in matters that pertain 
to our mental life . We often confuse theology 
which is the science of religion, with rehgion 
which is the fact — and the supremest of 
all the facts of our experience — much to the 
detriment and dispeace of both private 



28 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 



and public life. And still more frequently, 
and with still wider ill effects, we confuse 
between Logic, which is the science of 
reason, and the process of reasoning for 
which this science, even at its best, lamely 
and most inadequately accounts. As a rule 
ancient theories are accepted regarding this 
psychological process, by which reason moves 
from the httle to the better known ; and the 
most general laws of logic are treated as if 
they were adequate descriptions of the 
operation of those most complex forces by 
means of which experience grows. These 
laws must, of course, be kept, just as the 
merchant must add and subtract correctly 
when he makes up his accounts. But just 
as British commerce is more than addition 
and subtraction, so the reason of man is 
more than the logician's laws. Whether in 
ordinary human intercourse or in the pursuit 
of scientific knowledge, the elements which 
lead us to our conclusions are so numerous 
and so subtly interwoven as to render our 
theoretic account of them entirely inadequate. 
Here as elsewhere facts are larger than our 
knowledge, and are known only imperfectly 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 29 

and gradually. It is one thing to make use 
of nerves and muscles in walking — this a 
little child can do ; but not every physiologist 
could name all the nerves and muscles that 
the child calls into play. In Uke manner, 
it is one thing to proceed from fact to fact 
in knowledge, to bind truth to truth in the 
ever more complex organism of experience ; 
it is another thing to be able to set forth 
one by one the organic filaments that give 
it unity and order. A child may reason, 
and he is always reasoning and he builds 
up his world by reasoning ; but not all the 
theorists in the world can tell us all about 
the way in which he does it — so complex 
is the process. 

The complexity of the process is easily 
accounted for. It arises from the fact that in 
reasoning we bring the whole of our past 
experience to bear upon the particular 
statement we wish to test, or the object or 
event we wish to comprehend. The mathe- 
matician brings the knowledge, the literary 
critic brings the experience of his lifetime, 
to bear on each new problem. All our yester- 
days are concentrated upon our to-day, and 



30 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

all our experience is in the field when we 
reject or adopt a truth and try to form a 
judgment. So wonderful is the accumulative 
power of the human spirit. 

Now, if this be really the rational process 
which takes place, important consequences 
follow. And especially this consequence : 
that the truth which we test by means 
of our experience and accept when tested 
is built into the system of experience and 
is supported by that system. This is as 
much as to say that in such a case the 
grounds on which we accept the fact, the 
premises of our conclusion, are the totality 
of our experience. So bound up are experi- 
ence and the particular fact, that we cannot 
admit the former without admitting the 
latter, or deny the latter without over- 
throwing the former. 

This is the case with all those convictions 
which we say are ' deeply felt.' They are 
deeply felt. But their strength lies not in 
the feeling. The feeling arises from the 
consciousness of their strength, and their 
strength from the fact that they have been 
made one with our rational life by a thousand 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 3I 

judgments and practical experiences. The 
feeling of their vital truth is the result of 
a satisfied intelligence, and the intelligence 
is satisfied only when experience seems to 
be a congruous whole. This truth is seen, 
for example, in ordinary argumentation : 
you endeavour to refute your opponent by 
showing that his error carries some other 
error with it, that this second error carries 
still another, and that ultimately his whole 
rational experience is imperilled by his 
clinging to his false idea. You give him the 
highwayman's choice — ' Your error, or your 
intellectual hfe.' ' Deny this,' we say„ ' and 
nothing remains,' for behind this, nay, incor- 
porated with it and implicated in its fate, is 
the whole system of your associated thoughts. 

Such, then, is proof or the psychological 
process called reasoning. It is the bringing 
of facts together within a congruous or 
systematic experience. The proof of any 
fact or belief is at its strongest and completest 
when its premises ramify into experience 
as a whole, so that to deny it is to uproot 
and destroy experience. 

This is precisely the proof of Immortality 



32 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

that is offered by our poets. Grant us this 
conception they say, make this life the prelude 
to a life to come and the present world a 
part of a larger cosmos, then its sin and sorrow 
will have some significance, and God be at 
least conceivably wise and just and merciful. 
But refuse us this conception, and the 
world becomes the scene either of iron 
necessity or of bhnd chance ; man a pathetic 
compound of greatness and littleness — great- 
ness in his needs and aims and utter weakness 
in the satisfaction of them ; while the Being 
who could set so great a burden on so weak 
a back, who could call the incongruity into 
existence, is not a God but either a blundering 
or a cruel monster. 

Now, it is possible that the argument is 
not sound, in the sense that there are false 
steps in it ; but I desire to emphasize the 
fact that, even if it be imperfectly applied, 
the method is legitimate. It is in truth the 
method followed by us in all our knowing, 
and the one way we have of reasoning. 
And hence, in this respect, it is not less and 
not more open to the assault of scepticism 
than the surest knowledge we possess. 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 33 

Let me illustrate this identity of method 
by reference to our scientific knowledge. 

There is, I suppose, no physicist in the 
world who would deny the truths which 
Newton sought to express in his laws of 
motion. He will tell us that they are the 
presuppositions on which his whole science 
rests. No sooner, however, has he said this 
than the modem metaphysician seizes upon 
the word ' presupposition,' and answers : 
' Yea, verily, your science rests upon pre- 
suppositions, but " presupposition," like 
" hypothesis," is only another word for an 
assumption, a guess, a fabrication of the 
mind, an intellectual construct which you use 
for purposes of explanation.' And the 
answer is right, and altogether irrefutable 
so far as it goes. But only so far as it goes : 
it is a truth, but not the whole truth. For 
a presupposition, or hypothesis, is something 
more than a guess, which man may concoct 
at his own pleasure. It is a guess imposed 
upon his mind by the facts, it is the mind's 
first intuition of their meaning, it is the con- 
struct of an intellect guided by the realm of 
the real, and it is maintained only so long 

c 



34 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

as the realm of reality seems to support it. 
* Implicated with the truth of these laws of 
motion is the whole of my science,' replies 
the physicist ; nay, the whole of your own 
daily doings as a physical agent. Deny these 
truths and stand by your denial of them, 
and it is not only my science which will fall 
down in ruins, but your own practical life : you 
will be able to move neither hand nor foot, 
nor even the tongue that makes the denial. 
Every act of yours, every muscle you expand 
or contract in your standing or walking or 
lying down, is a proof of the truth of these 
principles. And surely what is proved by 
every one, everywhere, at all times, and 
whether he will or no, is tolerably secure, 
even although it is still called a hypothesis.' 
Now, there is no department of human life 
in which analogous truths do not evince 
themselves in similar ways ; in which, in 
other words, there are not found broad 
assumptions that are assumptions, but that 
are assumptions secured, rendered more 
and more impregnable, ratified, by every 
new experience ; and which, therefore, 
constitute just the surest knowledge that 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 35 

we have. They are not undeniable. Nothing 
is undeniable : sophistry can find nurture 
in any garbage. But if they are denied, 
the world becomes for the spirit of man a 
Golgotha — a place of skulls — and amongst 
the dead skulls is the sophist's own ; for 
scepticism refutes itself as well as its 
opponent and denies its own denial. 

Nowhere does this truth appear more 
clearly than in the matters of so-called 
' faith ' ; nowhere, in other words, is it 
more evident that there are some principles 
so vital to experience and therefore so 
secured by experience {which is just the thing 
that reasons) that to deny them is to reduce 
the world into chaos. Doubt of them is 
impossible : it turns into absurdity and 
madness. ' The mere discussion by anyone 
of the existence of God,' said that subtle 
spirit, Heine, ' causes me to feel a strange 
disquietude, an uneasy dread, such as I once 
experienced in visiting New Bedlam, when, 
for a moment, losing sight of my guide, 
I was surrounded by madmen. God is all 
that is, and doubt of his existence is doubt 
of hfe itself ; it is death.' Heine had made 



36 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

the discovery that God was essentially 
immanent in all his experience — the principle 
of sanity in all his life. And if that was so, 
then, indeed, had he attained the highest 
proof of God's existence ; for all he was and 
knew proved it. 

Now, it is the use of this same method 
of proof, however unconscious they were 
of its value, that has lent such power to the 
utterances of our poets. It is not the 
strength of their conviction, in the sense of 
the intensity of their feeling, that gives it 
cogency, but the broad grounds on which 
it rested. For the grounds were as broad 
as their experience. 

This world's no blot for us, 
Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good. 

Fra Lippo Lippi. 

O world, as God has made it ! All is beauty : 
And knowing this is love, and love is duty. 
Wliat further may be sought for, or declared ? 

How can we account for the fact that 
Browning who had sat so near the heart of 
humanity and felt the depths of its sorrow 
and crime and foolishness and frailty, could 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 37 

SO consistently throughout his hfe strike a 
note so free and full of joy ? Who told him 
that failure is but success in the making 
and that shadow implies light ? ' His heart,' 
you will reply. And I agree. But what is 
' the heart ' in such a context, except the 
whole rational experience of the man 
chastened and purified and enlightened by 
observation up and down the broad order 
of things and the ways of men, and made 
wise by much reflection. His faith was, 
indeed, ' the faith of reason.' It was reason 
that penetrated through the shows of life 
to the reality, and recognized, amidst the 
rubble, the fair proportions of the spiritual 
edifice that was being built. It was reason 
that stretched forth its hands and firmly 
held the principle that gives meaning and 
sanity and substance to the whole process. 
And the method which his reason employed 
is, in the last resort, identical with that 
which distinguishes between seeming and 
reality, first appearance and real meaning, 
in the sciences ; and identical, too, with 
that which establishes more and more 
securely the broad hypothesis on which we 



38 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

base our common knowledge of common 
things and our ordinary conduct and ways 
of life. 

Our poets, all unconsciously, follow the 
methods of science and ordinary knowledge 
in still other ways. They employ the nega- 
tive tests to these hypotheses, just as is 
done in other departments of knowledge. 
Supposing, asks Tennyson, we deny man's 
immortality, make the highest in man 
end in extinction, disintegrate him into dust, 
or shut him up into the rocks like a fossil — 
what follows ? 

Shall he, 

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, 
Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies. 

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, 
Who battled for the True, the Just, 
Be blown about the desert dust, 

Or seal'd within the iron hills ? 

Is this his whole history ? Then, indeed, 
is he a self-contradictory being, a standing 
absurdity in the world. 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 39 

No more ? A monster then, a dream. 
A discord. Dragons of the prime, 
That tare each other in their sUme, 

Were mellow music match'd with him. 

In Memoriam, Ivi* 

In this answer there is implied the sense 
of uttermost incongruity which comes from 
the denial of a great principle, and whose 
denial, therefore, only serves to make it 
more sure. Again, they employ the opposite 
or positive test. ' Grant us these great 
truths,' they seem to say, ' and what follows ? 
They become as a lamp to our feet and a 
light to our path.' They show all things 
in their proper place and order ; just as a 
hypothesis brings system and significance 
into the facts of natural science. 

You groped your way across my room i' the dear dark 

dead of night. 
At each fresh step a stumble was : but, once your 

lamp was alight. 
Easy and plain you walked again : so soon all wTong 

grew right ! Shah Abbas. 

In the wide context of the lives to come, 
sub specie aeternitatis, as Spinoza used to 
say, the present hfe and its natural setting 
become at least to some degree intelligible. 



40 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound. 

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing 

might issue thence ? 
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should 

be prized ? 

Abt Vogler. 

Thus did Browning find in this wider 
conception that links the here to the here- 
after and all to God, ' his resting place again,' 
the C major of his life. ' His hypothesis 
worked,' as we say ; and how much better 
than any other ! 

But there is still another way of testing 
a hypothesis than this of forecasting the 
broad consequences which result from its 
assertion or its denial. It is that of detailed 
experiment, and especially experiment by 
' negative instances,' to use the phrase 
famihar to scientific men. And this, too, 
our poets employed. They challenged their 
doubts, and brought their behefs to the 
proof of facts. Their virtue was no cloistered 
virtue, nor their race won without the dust 
and heat. This, above all, is the reason why 
they have strengthened the faith of so many 
thoughtful men and women, and exercised, 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 4I 

justly I believe, so profound an influence upon 
the religious life of their day. They had 
themselves been ' perplcxt in faith ; but pure 
in deeds ' ; and themselves ' they beat 
their music out.' Men of vast learning and 
a wide outlook, hating unbelief, but pre- 
ferring even that to the sleepy confidence 
of uninquiring ignorance, they were able 
to look at the world through the eyes of 
modem science, and they observed science, 
neither without sympathy nor yet without 
fear, build up step by step a natural world 
of an order immutable and of laws inexorable, 
apparently a blind mechanism at war with 
weak humanity. And they at once ask the 
ultimate question : ' Is the discord final, 
then ? ' 

Are God and Nature then at strife, 
That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 
So careful of the type she seems. 

So careless of the single life ? 

In Memortam, Iv. 

' Nay ! Is nature careful even of the 
type ? ' Tennyson asks again, deepening 
still further the strain of doubt. 



42 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

' So careful of the type ? ' But no. 

From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, ' A thousand types are gone : 
I care for nothing, all shall go.' 

In Memoriam, Ivi. 

' The ideas of God and immortality are 
not for the poet the result of reasoning upon 
the phenomena of external Nature, He 
appears to have held consistently throughout 
his life, that if we did not bring them with us 
to the examination of Nature, but simply 
used our reason upon it without taking into 
account the evidence derived from our own 
nature, we should not believe either in 
God or in immortality.' ^ And his conclu- 
sion from such premises was just. Nature 
severed from man and the spiritual possi- 
bilities he brings with him is, indeed, a 
defective witness. But Nature with man 
left out is not Nature, but a fragment of 
her real self — a fragment, too, that leaves 
the highest unexpressed. But place man in 
Nature, and Nature in man ; let Nature 
produce him and let him express her meaning, 
and we have no longer the impossible task 

^ Professor A. C. Bradley, ' Commentary on lu Memoriam.' 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 43 

to confront of deducing the living from the 
dead. Main throws fresh hght upon the 
processes which have brought him into 
being. 

From the grand result 
A supplementary- rcllux of light, 
Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains 
Each back step in the circle. . . . 
.... Man, once descried, imprints for ever 
His presence on all life-less tilings : the winds 
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 
A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh. 
Never a senseless gust now man is bom. 
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts, 
A secret they assemble to discuss. 

Paracelsus. 

and so on, throughout the close of that 
magnificent early poem of Browning, wherein 
his promise shows so vast that even his great 
hfe-work has never seemed to me quite to 
fulfil it. With man come intelligence, with 
man come spiritual qualities, weak enough 
at first, but spiritual all the same ; and 
amongst them come love and with love, 
God himself. And Love explains all, for 
it finds itself everywhere^^ It makes Para- 
celsus wise at length 



44 TH^ IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind. 

To know even hate is but a mask of love's, 

To see a good in evil, and a hope 

In ill-success ; to sympathise, be proud 

Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim 

Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies. 

Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts ; 

All with a touch of nobleness, despite 

Their error, upward tending all though weak. 

Like plants in mines which never saw the sun, 

But dream of him, and guess where he may be, 

And do their best to climb and get to him. 

Paracelsus. 

Here at last, do Tennyson and Browning 
find a conception which is adequate to their 
needs. Nature impMes man ; man, in virtue 
of his spiritual qualities, and especially of 
his love, implies God ; and God, who is 
most of all God in his love, brings with him 
all the things that man can need, and amongst 
these ' Immortality, or something better ' — 
if better there can be. Such, in the last 
resort, is the argument advanced by both 
our poets. Love is the good supreme, the 
veritable substance beneath the shows of 
hfe, the reality within their seeming. 

There is no good of hfe but love — but love ! 

What else looks good, is some shade flung from love. 

Love gilds it, gives it worth. 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 45 

There is no fact which, if seen to the heart, 
will not prove to have love for its purpose, 
and, therefore, for its real being and essence. 
It is the one positive and constitutive 
principle in the nature of things. And it is 
through it, as the bursting into some new 
form of an elemental, all-per\'ading power, 
that every event in the history of the world 
and of man is ultimately to be explained. 
This is the light, the logos, the divine word, 
which makes all things plain ; which shows 
that 

No detail but, in place allotted it, was prime 
And perfect. 

If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud. 
It is but for a time : I press God's lamp 
Close to my breast ; its splendour, soon or late, 
Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day. 

Paracelsus. 

Both Teimyson and Browning would 
attribute this final assurance to something 
else than knowledge, and they would not 
call it proof. 

Like an /Eolian harp that wakes 

No certain air, but overtakes 

Far thought with music that it makes : 



46 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

Such seem'd the whisper at my side : 

' What is it thou knowest, sweet voice ? ' I cried. 

' A hidden hope,' the voice repUed : 

So heavenly-toned, that in that hour 
From out my sullen heart a power 
Broke, like the rainbow from the shower. 

To feel, altho' no tongue can prove. 
That every cloud, that spreads above 
And veileth love, itself is love. 

The Two Voices. 

Their certainty was what is usually called 
immediate, intuitive ; it anticipated know- 
ledge and outran proof. But we have found 
the same so-called intuition, the same out- 
running of proof — which is really the forecast 
of reason and the first step of proof — in 
aU our knowledge. We have examples of 
it in every science, and above all in the 
conception of the world as ruled by law 
that somehow secures permanence amidst 
change, unity in variety, and the strength 
that clothes itself with beauty. It is in 
this faith, or on this hypothesis, that science 
seeks to know and man leads his daily life. 
And this hypothesis is not proved, for there 
are still in the natural world causes we 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 47 

cannot trace, effects we cannot account for. 
Ihit it is being proved. Science, philosophy, 
nay, the common thoughts of men and their 
common actions are, in the last resort, 
nothing else but one continuous and unresting 
proof of it. It remains a hypothesis, and 
will remain a hypothesis to the end of time ; 
but it is a hypothesis surer than any particular 
fact, for it is a condition of the meaning of 
every fact. This is why I should call it 
knowledge. And in the same sense, I call 
that knowledge which our poets call ' faith.' 

Now, it is no new thing in our days thus 
to assimilate rehgious behef to the creed of 
science, and to say that the latter like the 
former rests on hypothesis. But it is in- 
tended thereby to disarm the reason that 
questions as well as the reason that answers. 
This is to defend the weakness of the one 
by the weakness of the other, and to seek 
refuge in the darkest depths of despair. 

And yet even this argument is not without 
its truth or without its use. It is true 
that all our knowledge — not philosophy, not 
science only, but the knowledge that ' thou 
art thou and hast hands and feet ' — rests 



48 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

on hypothesis. The element of truth in 
this argument is, Uke every truth, a useful 
truth. And its use lies here : it shows 
this, at least, that Agnosticism, Positivism, 
Scepticism have no right to concentrate 
their attacks upon man's religious beliefs 
alone. The argument they direct against 
these behefs apphes in the same manner 
and has precisely the same validity when 
directed against all other knowledge, even 
that which appears to be most immediate 
and direct. The argument, therefore, proves 
too much. It destroys the very engines of 
attack, for it destroys the knowledge with 
which knowledge is assailed. 

' You play the order of Nature, against 
the higher order of moral law and religious 
faith,' we can say to them. ' But your 
probing is not deep enough, and your doubts 
lack courage. Probe further, intensify your 
doubt, use your weapons and spare not. 
You will then find that your weapons are 
turned against your own breast, and that 
you are rending your own vitals. You have 
a half-truth in your hands, and it is the sure 
mark of a half-truth that it refutes itself, 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 49 

and makes room for a fuller truth. You 
have remembered that your beliefs rest on 
hypotheses : you have forgotten that tliere 
are some hypotheses which are so inwrought 
into the very texture of rational experience 
that to deny them is to destroy experience.' 

Such a hypothesis, I believe, is the hypo- 
thesis in which our poets found an anchor 
that held. And if I have not misunderstood 
the most daring and, on the whole, the most 
successful of all the schemes which modern 
thought has employed to bring some order 
into this strange world, and into the still 
stranger life of man, it rests upon the same 
hypothesis and brings the same message to 
mankind. It is the hypothesis of God. 

Harbouring no error that it can detect, 
fostering no hope however fair that merely 
flatters, fearing no failure, or contradiction, 
or sorrow or sin that darkens human life, 
but confronting them all with open brow, 
nay, recognizing that on every hand and in 
every detail of the simplest fact there are 
meanings it cannot fathom, it still finds its 
hypothesis work. That which the idea of 
cause is to the common mind, or the concep- 



50 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

tion of the order of nature to the man of 
science — a principle he must hold true or 
cease to think, and which he is always proving 
though no proof is final — such is the concep- 
tion of God to the Idealist. He finds it 
implied in all his knowledge, the final premise 
of all his Ufe. To this conception he returns 
from all his wanderings ; indeed it has 
followed him all the way, for it is the very 
life of aU his thinking. 

That it is ' only a hypothesis ' is true ; 
and being only a hypothesis, designed to 
bring order into the Ufe of man and intelligible 
coherence into the scheme of things, it must 
stand side by side with other hypotheses — 
with chance, or fate, with matter or blind 
necessity. And need we fear the comparison? 
Can we not ask of this conception what 
order is there in the hfe of man or in the 
world, which is not at least conceivably 
of its bringing ; what achievement, whether 
in knowledge or in goodness, which it has 
not inspired and guided ? Ultimate proof 
of its truth can only come when there is 
no enigma which in its light does not become 
plain, and the Universe is seen to be the 



IN TENNYSON AND BROWNING 51 

transparent garment of God. But what 
advance is there which is not a progressive 
proof that it is valid ? What is the move- 
ment of civilization itself except a gradual 
revelation of God, and the coming of his 
kingdom ? Or is there a better fate that 
we can desire for man, who ' learns through 
evil that God is best,' than this of finding 
ever more fuUy as the ages move that he 
lives in God. 

That God, which ever lives and loves, 

One God, one law, one element. 

And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves. 

In Memoriam, cxxxi. 

Man has the right of reason to this faith, 
and this faith brings with it, to quote the 
wise words of Dr. Edward Caird, ' If not 
Immortality, then something better, if better 
there can be.' 






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